Running into Nektos/Act error permission denied when running actions locally

Question

Pretty new to Nektos/act and in general running workflows locally and cant seem to find a solution to a permissions denied error when installing Node version 16. Here is the error I am running into when I run the following:

Command:

act -j release

Error:

docker exec cmd=[mkdir -p /var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v1/] user= workdir=
mkdir: cannot create directory '/var/run/act/actions': Permission denied

Yaml (Example)

name: Release Example
on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
jobs:
  release:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          token: ${{secrets.PRIVATE_SECRET}}

      - name: Use version 16 of Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: '16'

      - name: Pre Install
        run: echo "//npm.pkg.github.com/:_authToken=${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}"> ~/.npmrc

      - name: Install
        run: npm ci
        env:
          PRIVATE_SECRET: ${{secrets.PRIVATE_SECRET}}

      - name: Release
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.PRIVATE_SECRET}}
          PRIVATE_SECRET: ${{secrets.PRIVATE_SECRET}}
          REGISTRY_TOKEN: ${{secrets.PRIVATE_SECRET}}
        run: npx semantic-release

What I have tried:

1. I have tried setting the user to root on the container for example

   container:
     image: ghcr.io/catthehacker/ubuntu:full-20.04
     options: --user root
   

2. I have tried setting sudo in steps

    - run: sudo chown runner:docker /var/run/docker.sockenter
   

3. I have tried passing the secrets via acts flags

4. I have tried setting the working directory and setting env auth override to true

5. I have checked issues related to this topic on the repo and it seems like others are facing the same issue but I have not been able to figure out a solution.

NOTE: This is all working on GitHub, but fails locally with the error mentioned above. Trying hard to test locally to not muddy up my repo with broken commits. Any help is greatly appreciated.